AnaElda Ramos | Illustration Editor

Go down into a squat, drop to your knees as quietly as you can, and then collapse onto your side. Practice this sequence enough times, and you’ll have perfected a damsel in distress fall. This was one of the techniques the Central Illinois Stage Combat Workshop (CISCO) taught a small group of WashU students on Sunday, Nov. 10. This one-hour workshop hosted by the Performing Arts Department (PAD) introduced basic stage combat safety rules and strategies.

Two CISCO instructors, DC Wright and Aime Root, taught the workshop. Wright is the Head of Movement and Stage Combat at Western Illinois University, while Root is pursuing an MFA in Directing at that same institution. They traveled to St. Louis to educate performers on stage combat and inform them of CISCO programs.  

“The Central Illinois Stage Combat Workshop is a three-week stage combat training program for acting performers. We try to seek out universities that could use more combat in their programs so that we can provide actors with training so they can stay safe and tell effective violent stories,” Root said. 

The workshop started with introductions and an overview of stage combat principles, where Wright and Root emphasized the importance of consent and communication during simulated acts of violence. The first exercise, a fast-paced hand-clapping game, familiarized the group with stage combat basics like spatial awareness and rhythm. The game proved to be a surprising challenge for seasoned actors and newbies alike. After several attempts and plenty of failures that fostered camaraderie within the group, everyone was ready to dive into stage combat. 

The rest of the workshop focused on the act of pushing while on stage. The instructors split the group into pairs and had each pair attempt to emulate the natural motion of pushing one another. 

“It made a lot of sense, the way that they explained … recreating the shape and the musculature of how you would do something. I feel like now that even though we just learned [pushing] … that can probably be applied in a lot of different areas of stage combat,” Taylor Miller, a senior in the drama program, said

Wright and Root explained that tapping into automatic and unconscious movement is critical to stage combat. The group mastered two simulated violence skills similar to the pushing exercise: throwing and falling. Each pair picked somebody to throw and somebody to fall, switching after each attempt to allow both partners the chance to practice. The person throwing would stand slightly behind the person falling. Then, the person throwing would gently grab their partner’s bicep and shoulder, pulling them back and pretending to shove them. The person falling would then take some steps forward, turn around, drop to a squat, transition onto their knees, and descend to their side. 

“I think it helped me build more on my fundamentals of what I knew about stage combat. I was catching things that I realized I was doing wrong, and it was a really exciting thing to be like, ‘Oh, there is more to this than I thought there was,’” senior drama student Ella Sherlock said. 

The CISCO instructors ended the workshop with a discussion on safety, techniques, and the importance of stage combat knowledge for everyone in the performing arts. 

“[Our goal is] making sure that actors at least encounter some of the basic stage combat … Violence is at the height of conflict, and telling stories in theater is all about conflict. Like 90% of theatrical anything has stage combat in it,” Root said. 

Sherlock and Miller found out about the event from the PAD newsletter. 

“I love taking the workshops on campus! They had … a clowning workshop last year, and I love[d] that. I’m always looking to work on my skills. It was so fun,” Sherlock said. “There’s a ton of really cool creative opportunities within the PAD [that] I feel like people don’t really know about, and we miss awesome workshops like this … I think that more people should come to [them] whether or not they’re interested in performing … It’s just a really cool experience overall.”